Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday rolls around and we get this request. How timely!

A reader asks:

I’m looking for a book about Edgar Allan Poe that takes place around the time of Poe’s death, and takes place in Baltimore. It is a mystery and I think the cover is gray and Poe’s name is in the title.

Ooh, I know this one!

It’s The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. A young Baltimore lawyer with good propects who is also an admirer  of Poe’s, indignant with the tarnishing of Poe’s reputation at his death, starts prying into the details at the expense of his own reputation, finances, and sanity. It’s not horror, although some horrific things happen, but the author does an amazing job of recreating historical Baltimore and tracing the theories of exactly what did happen to Edgar Allan Poe.

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